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The dreaded accusative

av Lynchie1975, 27 mars 2012

Meddelanden: 44

Språk: English

Lynchie1975 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 11:34:53

Hello everyone. I have been learning esperanto for just over a week, now, and, with the help of google translate(to construct sentences, not to directly translate), I have already become reasonably conversant with the language...BUT...there is one thing that I can never seem to get right, the accusative ending. Given that most people I have seen on Lernu, and the wider internet, use the SVO sentence structure, is the accusative ending really necessary these days? It seems to me that it would make esperanto much easier to learn if this aspect of the language was given less emphasis, or perhaps was only used for clarity. Just a thought from a new learner. I am sure that some people find it quite easy; I just can't work out when, and when not, to use it.

omid17 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 13:47:05

Search within the archives; this is a recurring theme in this forum and the issue has been discussed to death.

I think in Ido that is the case, i.e the -n suffix is optional.

But in Esperanto rules will remain intact and there are arguments behind this unchangeability. One of them is that no matter how much we moderate a language, it will never be perfect and history has shown that some people will still come up with presumably better ideas for improving it. Constantly modifying the rules will make a bulk of already published material obsolete. This alienates potentially interested people, in that, the idea of learning a language which is in a constant state of fundamental flux isn't that appealing. The language would then sound like an unfinished project or an idea in early stages of development.

mschmitt (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 13:48:56

SVO is not as popular as you think. I'm an old school Esperanto veteran who learned it before Google Translate (started in summer of 2011 actually lango.gif ) and using the courses here, learning to use the accusative ending isn't overly hard. With some experience, you'll see that it makes a lot of sense, too. ridulo.gif

Lynchie1975 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 14:39:47

Personally, I can see the idea behind a language remaining static, as that would make its learning easier, but, I do think that all languages do change, and I don't think that Esperanto should remain static either. I just think that a lot of people I have seen complain about this aspect of Esperanto, and therefore, ideally it should be reviewed, if not changed.

Lynchie1975 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 14:42:36

I don't think that the accusative ending would be difficult to learn if it was the case that it was always used in a grammatically correct sentence, but there are occasions when it is not used. For me(admittedly I've not been learning very long, about a week or so), I find it easy to know when it should be used, but difficult to know when it shouldn't be.

sudanglo (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 15:53:43

Ho ve! La timiga akuzativo. Tion vi devas lerni, eĉ se necesas atenta studo, Lychie.

(Oh dear! The scary accusative. That's something you have to learn, even if it requires some study.)

Would you expect, everything to be easy if you had been learning Turkish, or Japanese, or Russian for a week. Esperanto is easy, but not that easy.

By the way, having SVO as the customary order, as well as marking the object allows stylistic effects as well as sorting things out with Proper names where the object (and the subject) is not marked - Zamenhof ŝatis Basingstoke.

Across the world's languages SVO is quite common, incidentally.

Furthermore, there are quite a few subtle potential ambiguities the accusative resolves. You'll come across them later.

Zafur (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 17:04:31

Well I know there's a few words it shouldn't come after, but the most common is probably esti.
Such as "Mi estas hundo." Then there's also the difference with movement/location.

Lynchie1975 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 17:35:40

I think that would make it far easier to understand, if instructional material that is available made it clearer when to use it, and when not to. A friend of mine, today, told me that it shouldn't be used with the verb "to be", I hadn't come across that anywhere.
Zafur:Well I know there's a few words it shouldn't come after, but the most common is probably esti.
Such as "Mi estas hundo." Then there's also the difference with movement/location.

Lynchie1975 (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 17:40:04

No, I wouldn't expect for it not to have some difficulties, but I would have expected that a universal language would be as easy as POSSIBLE. I know that it is useful for putting emphasis on a certain part of a sentence, etc, but, for me, it seems unnecessarily complicated. I suppose the idea that esperanto sentences can be structured in different ways seems strange for me, too. If I had invented it(and I know that I wouldn't have anywhere near the brilliance to do that, as Zamenhof did), I would have made one rule for sentences, so that people would only have to remember one thing so far as sentence structure goes.

RiotNrrd (Visa profilen) 27 mars 2012 17:54:48

It marks the direct object. It shows movement towards something. It can replace a preposition.

That is when you should use it. When you are expressing any of those things, you should use it.

There.

Now, why wouldn't you use it with "esti"? Because it's likely there's no direct object to mark in a sentence with esti.

The sentence "Mi estas hundo", for example, completely lacks an object. The sentence is all about the subject, and there's nothing else that the subject is operating on. So, what would you mark? You can't mark "mi" because that's the subject. And you can't mark "hundo" because that's been equated to the subject (by esti). So... no -n here.

Don't operate under the (wrong) belief that on one side of every verb is a subject and on the other side is an object. It doesn't work that way. Instead, learn how to identify what a subject and an object actually is. That way you'll know when to mark the object and when there isn't an object to mark.

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